Just got back from a few days up on Hamilton Island in the fantastic Whitsunday Islands on the Great Barrier Reef.
Highs:
- Diving trip to the Bait Reef on the Great Barrier Reef and seeing ridiculous amounts of coral and its mindblowing spectrum of reef fish (Nemo), white tip reef sharks and sea turtles
- Helicopter flight over Whitsunday island with the magical Hill Inlet (picture above) and Whitehaven Beach, Australia’s most photographed beach
- Hiking up onto the 240m high Passage Peak in the early morning
- The ever present and very communicative cockatoos
- More sea turtles and tons of stingrays casually snorkling in Catseye beach just in front of the resort
- Patting some very tame and cuddly dingos
Lows:
- Hamilton Island literally being one big resort with everything commercial somehow connected and expensive
- Bad food
- Being tickled by a jellyfish
- My ears struggling with the pressure equalization during the dive
If you’re over 25 you would remember the time before the interwebs and what coming home from a trip brought with it being checking the mail and phone messages then doing laundry. These days I’m always astonished what the digital life asks for. I must have spent hours checking email and Facebook, going through my RSS feeds, updating Wordpress, editing and uploading pictures to my photo blog and create a Facebook album. Much to the displeasure of my needy dog Mack.
Right, I’m off to Hamilton Island, one of the 74 Whitsunday Islands on the Great Barrier Reef, for a few days so no posts but here’s a collection of links I collected during the past week:
- First off, like every Xmas, it’s time to ElfYourself with OfficeMax
- Then, aLp, Alien Loves Predator, is back!
- 10 reasons to find a blog buddy
- Rumors around LCD Soundsystem, the world’s greatest band, splitting up
- Australia film not received well overseas
- Offbeat Guides, personalised travel books as a PDF or real-life copy (why not just a mobile app?)
- bio-bak.nl, hit it!
- Lessons in Internet Marketing
- FlowingData’s visual guide to the financial crisis
- Typealyzer: analyse a blog
- Ever heard of the mysterious sailing stones on Racetrack Playa, a seasonally dry lake in the Death Valley?
- AdAge asks whether magazine publishers still believe in the act of publishing
- A list of 10 free CMS systems
- PC Magazine goes online only (like most print media in the near future)
- Time magazine asks how many blogs the world needs
- Microsoft to rebrand Live Search
- Wired lists the top 10 amazing biology videos
- Resumes are dead. Social media is your new resume
- The End Flickr set
- The HD version of Digital Kitchen’s True Blood title sequence (also check out the featurette)
- Monty Python now has a YouTube channel
- Last but not least the good old baby powder hair dryer prank
In the last few years I’ve often wondered who the person was that kept beautifying the fence of the bridge over Boundary St here in Sydney. And today I met him doing a little piece next to my house:
Andy Uprock is a Sydney based artist whos work includes transforming streetscapes into large floating cup installations. The method and practice of his work runs parallel to the culture of graffiti and he titles this movement ‘Cuprocking.’
Check out his website and if you’re in Sydney then you might be interested in the upcoming exhibition Trailblazers:
